There are plenty of left behinds at one of Alan’s rental properties, and, as a favor, I am working overtime to get things cleaned up for the next renter.
The last tenants, Section 8, left two weeks after they were supposed too, left food in the frig, a back yard full of refuse, stained carpet, damaged doors, leaky faucets, missing window screens and the smell of dereliction.
In the back yard are stuffed animals, clothes hangers, birthday cards, vacuum hoses, unused cleaning rags, baseballs, cardboard boxes and kitty litter. When tenants leave, they leave behind their don’t wants and seldom leave a place as it was when they moved in.
Utility bills pile up in the mailbox like unwanted holiday visitors.
Jackson Compaction has delivered a dumpster and into the dumpster has gone all the discards we can pack. Their motto is ” You Trash It; We Smash It. ”
Robert and I load the trash carefully, to save space, fill the container methodically, then lay carpet over the top to keep stuff from crawling back out.
There is no recourse. Ex-tenants, like ex husbands or wives, have already gone their way, found another nest to dirty, and don’t have money or resources to settle. Getting a hundred will cost two hundred.
There is painting to do, floors to be replaced, new kitchen cabinets to hang. When all is done, there will be another renter. My brother Alan says Section 8 will never happen again.
” That, ” he says, ” You can take to the bank. ”
On top of Sandia Peak is a rock house built in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corp. Coming out of a government prolonged Depression, the CCC was created to provide relief to unemployed men by the U.S. Congress and F.D.R.
During a short decade, over 300,000 young men got a place to stay, food to eat, and a small salary for working on public projects. They upgraded services in rural areas, built and upgraded National Parks, helped build Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, gained dignity in hard times. This program was one of the more popular out of Roosevelt’s New Deal but it was shut down, unfunded, when World War 2 provided more grim employment possibilities.
The rock house, which would make Fred and Wilma Flintstone a nice vacation home, is perched on the edge of Sandia cliff with a million dollar view of Albuquerque. To the west is the Rio Grande river. To the north is the Sandia Indian Casino and golf course. In the middle of town is an eight story bank building at San Mateo and Central, the original Albuquerque skyscraper. To the south is Sandia Labs that engineers weapons and conducts weapons research, and Kirtland Air Force Base, storage home for nukes.
This afternoon there are scattered hikers and curious on the promontory. The rock house is a mile and a half hike from the visitor center and tram and there are small pockets of snow left in shaded areas by fallen logs or clusters of granite boulders.
Unemployment is still with us, a stubborn reality.
Finding men and women to join the CCC would be difficult these days.
Picking up your check at the mailbox is much easier than stacking stones.
Hillsboro is a hard scrawny town on the way from Truth or Consequences, where I used to live, to Silver City, New Mexico..
In the old days Hillsboro was a gold and silver mining collage of wood shacks, shovels, dynamite, barbed wire but today it has lost its luster.
When its precious metals played out, there were copper mines left, but they were shut down too and moved overseas when costs and government regulations became too onerous.
Hillsboro used to have apple orchards and a popular annual Apple Festival that peddled apples, arts and crafts, food and live music but that disappeared after management stole money and absconded to Europe.
At one time, main street here had a biker bar that drew Harley Davidson enthusiasts from Albuquerque and Las Cruces but that attraction closed when the bar’s owner sold the liquor license for a ton of money.
A recent couple, trying to bring magic back to the town, have opened a winery on Main Street, the highway you take to Silver City, but this morning they are packing their belongings and have driven a For Sale sign in the front yard.
Today, becoming gold prospectors,my friend John and I use gold detectors instead of picks.
Working our way up hillsides, we wave our battery powered wands over rocky soil. We have tried the detectors around the house with loose change to practice before getting serious. We haven’t found gold yet but we have found barbed wire, nails, bottle caps, and rusty beer cans.
Tomorrow will be yet another gold hunting day. Expectations will be lower, but hope refuses to die.
Those yesteryear miners were tough S.O.B.’s and more stubborn than their donkey’s.
For every gold nugget, there is a trail of blood, sweat, and tears,
For every dream, there is heartache.
This 800 square foot frame stucco two bedroom one bath single car garage house has been in the family since the fifties.
It has been a residence for dozens of renters, some good, some bad. Through time, much property maintenance was done that is now being re-done. It rents for seven hundred and fifty a month today when one hundred and twenty five used to give a renter the front door key.
This time the place is for sale to a good owner, someone who has time and money to grow a garden in the back yard, put in rocks and desert landscaping, add another room and a bath. The neighborhood, by San Mateo and Kathryn, is acceptable though you see transients pushing grocery carts down San Mateo towards Wal Mart. The War Zone is a few miles to the east but homes in this Parkland Hills neighborhood still show signs of committed ownership with new windows, landscaping, solar panels.
It brings back ghosts to work here.
I see my dad fixing a front screen door and brothers raking leaves and mowing the front yard when it had grass, decades ago.
Two big Chinese elms occupy the front yard and birds leave presents on my car each day I park here.
I miss my Dad sorely, but this house won’t be mourned when a new owner moves in.
A Sold sign will bring me closure.
In the hotel lobby, each day, this artist/craftsman unfolds two tables.
He is dipping his brush into color and applying paint as I watch. When done with one color, he cleans his brush in a glass of water, wipes the residue off with a towel, then switches to another color on the bowl he is working on.
These little bowls are finely detailed.
The one I purchase has turtles swimming on the inside. Any of these will look good on a coffee table and put conversation in motion. They make a good place for rubber bands, hard sweet peppermint candies, wandering coins.
An ancient God, playing flute, dances around the inside of another finished bowl.
Whether his muse is Gods, or money, is a question only he can answer?
On the walls of his home he might have spectacular canvases of Incan jungles, ancient costumes, and wild untamed animals, or reproductions of Diego Rivera’s murals, posters of soccer stars, or photos of his wife, children and grandchildren.
Modern urban life can take the spirit right out of you, if you aren’t vigilant.
There are several marinas in Mazatlan.
The northern marina tends towards pleasure while the southern marina gravitates towards work.
This Sunday the only event that draws skippers off their boats are NFL playoffs on high def TVs in bars and restaurants close to the water.There are security gates at each boat ramp that lead down to slips where boats small and large are tethered. On Sunday, yacht owners aren’t busy. Some of the sailing craft here, be they sailboats or yachts, cost in the hundreds of thousands.
On a window near the bar where Alan, Dave and I have lunch, there are For Sale notes for more modest craft. Someone looking for a cheap place in Mazatlan can buy a 30 foot Bayliner with a diesel engine for eight thousand and park in a slip for twenty four cents a foot per day year round. You have it all – security, socializing, proximity, alcohol, sun, and surf.
All in all, this marina leaves the impression that some people have too much money and it needs to be distributed. That thinking, though, needs to be scuttled.
It is bad policy to worry too much about what other people have, and how they got it.
Only politicians keep sipping from this straw.
Our original trip concept was to take RVs to Mexico, stay on the beach a month, drink beer, and check out bikinis.
Our original destination was to be San Carlos, Mexico – up the coast north from Mazatlan. There was a RV park already picked out. But things change, all the time and quickly, so that trip idea turned and became a different animal.
Because diesel fuel is of a lower grade in Mexico, Alan didn’t want to drive his RV to San Carlos. By the time we three figured the cost of fuel, insurance, space rent ,it was going to be cheaper to take a traditional vacation to a hotel with hot water and maid service so we dropped our idea of a RV caravan.
On a morning walk, Alan and I discover a RV park in Mazatlan where we all might have stayed if we had brought our RV’s. It is on the beach, in the middle of the Zona Dorado, and affordable. Seeing these big rigs pulled in between palm trees on a dirt lot and old guys in shorts riding rusting bicycles to the front doors of their luxurious motor homes, brings a fuzziness to my heart. The snowbirds carry English newspapers in little wire bicycle baskets and will spend this afternoon working on a crossword puzzle because it is too hot to go fishing.
Jose, the park’s maintenance man, waves when we knock on the closed office door and we talk with him in broken Spanish, enough to understand that it costs five hundred dollars a month to stay here and you pay for your electric. This park is right on the beach and some patrons come down for months. The office is closed but this park doesn’t need much management with these old guys taking care of most nuisances themselves.
In a place like this you want to live quiet, economical, and simple. You want to have a few friends you can count on and buy lots of shrimp on the beach from fishermen who just come in. A couple of beers in the evening to calm the mind are good, and reading ” Old Man and the Sea ” puts your mind in the right frame.
Here, in Mazatlan, we all have time to savor our time.
In the morning, before ten, the beaches are empty except for romantics, beachcombers, and elderly walking their dogs.
Around this place, people stay up late, dance into the late hours, have a few too many drinks, keep everyone at the hotel awake as they stumble down hallways with all too many doors looking the same.
The Malecon is a wide sidewalk that runs from Valentino’s to the Centro of Mazatlan. It parallels the beach and gives ample room for bicycles, walkers, joggers, hand holders, pet walkers, photographers, street hustlers, tourists and locals. The thoroughfare is level, the potholes far and few between, and, if you wish, you can take concrete steps down to the beach and feel sand between your toes. It reminds me of the Rambla in Montevideo though the sunlight in Mazatlan is more intense than sunlight in Montevideo.
At breakfast, our conversation is about re-locating to Mexico from America, and Americans.
“You don’t want to be around Americans,” Dave insists.
What he says is understandable, but we are Americans. It sticks on us like a glove. You can change your clothes, work on your accent, hang out with the locals, smoke non filter cigarettes and eat shrimp till your eyes bulge,but you will always be a gringo.
You can take Americans out of their country but you can’t take America out of American’s.
Being an American doesn’t prohibit you from enjoying Mazatlan for as long as you want to stay. As long as you are spending green dollars, there is tolerance here for you.
People here might not like Americans, but they love our American money.
I-10 takes you to Los Angeles if you stay on it all the way.
Out of Wilcox, Arizona the Interstate takes you along a steadily winding uphill road that goes from long flat expanses to foothills and into rugged mountains. Several miles before you get to Texas Canyon, a collection of rock formations that look like a group of dinosaur’s ridged backs, you come to a ghost town called Stein’s. There is a faded billboard promoting the place that has survived highway beautification and Ladybird Johnson.
Usually Stein’s has just been a glance to my right and is passed by. There is nothing here but old wood cabins, rusted machines, cactus, barbed wire fences and trailers for people who want to live away from other people because it is easier that way.
I drive over an overpass, follow a gravel road that ends at a closed chain link gate. There is a sign with red lettering that says the place is closed and two men inside the fence today are burning weeds and trying to get the best of their rakes and shovels.
“You closed?”
“They are,” one says, suspicious of my intentions.
“Good place for a movie shoot.”
“They did a few here,” comes a grunt, “but the highway noise makes it hard. Kills the sound man. ”
“Is the Museum open?”
“No, the owner’s husband was murdered here and it has been closed four years. She doesn’t know what she is going to do. ”
When a place has a population of two and one gets murdered you have devastation.
My love affair with Stein’s ends as quick as it began and I pull back out on the Interstate with relief, glad to leave the two prisoners to their work detail.
Stein’s is now in my rear view mirror and its history is sad.
It is just another comma in a long winded Faulkner novel where people are born, live, and die while moss grows thick in the trees and the difference between humans and animals is only razor thin.
Your chariot has to be tuned up to keep you in the Los Angeles race.
You aren’t going to get anywhere in this L.A. burg without a good set of wheels, a team of rested and well fed horses, and enough time to get where you are going through a maze of interconnected freeways, on and off ramps, incorporated towns that remind you of a patchwork quilt with each town independent but linked to the others to make a California dreaming quilt.
It is almost a forty minute drive to Los Angeles to reach Chris’s mechanic.
Ontario, where Chris and his mom live, is fifty miles from the Pacific Ocean, the Getty Museum, Staples Center, Sunset Strip, Hollywood, the Walk of Fame, and other landmarks. His car’s CHECK engine light is on and fan belts, recently replaced, are slipping and making a squeal..It isn’t something any garage can’t fix but when you get a mechanic you trust, you will grudgingly drive the hour to let him work his car magic on your car.
The Auto Care Center,when we pull in, is busting open at the seams with car hoods up, tires off, doors open, uniformed grease junkies busily removing and replacing parts, running computer checks, calling parts suppliers. It is the day before Christmas and cars are doing what they invariably do – break down.
Chris’s car belts are tightened and his check engine light turns out to be caused by not tightening down on the gas cap enough so a seal is broken and escaping emissions trigger a sensor.
On the way back to Ontario we stay off the freeways.
Chris, who cared for my dad and Roseanne, in California, was exceedingly fond of my Dad.
California was never a place my dad wanted to be, and, at the end, he wasn’t.
Chris and I still have plenty of J.L. stories, and all of them make us smile, to tell, even when they don’t have happy endings.
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